----------------------------------------------------------------- Goanetter Francis Rodrigues (Vasco/Toronto) book launch in London, England @ the World Goa Day festivities on 15 Aug at 7pm Details http://www.konkanisongbook.com
----------------------------------------------------------------- Goa's Taliban: At Our Cultural Crossroads by V. M. de Malar Goa's future as a cultural centre hangs by a single thread today, as State Museum authorities continue to formulate their response to the Hindu Janajagruti Samiti's demand that an uncontroversial painting (of a white bull) by M. F. Husain be removed from its modest gallery of contemporary Indian master artists. If the director of the museum, Radha Bhave capitulates to this unreasonable demand, it will mean instant destruction of all the goodwill and credibility that Goa has painstaking accumulated as a hospitable, nationally significant centre for film, art, music and literature. It is vital that all the stakeholders who have contributed to this development -- from Kala Academy to the Entertainment Society of Goa to the artists, writers and musicians of our state -- now ensure that the accumulated results of their hard work isn't lost at this critical juncture. The stakes are extremely high. In the past five years, Goa's cultural profile has risen steadily. It has become a centre for film-making, just last week the director Rakeysh (Rang de Basanti) Mehra predicted Goa will be "India's next film capital." In addition, for the first time ever, painters like Subodh Kerkar, Antonio e Costa and Viraj Naik are demonstrating that mature international careers are possible even if you live in a Goan village. And our state has also become home or retreat to an unbelievable array of literary luminaries -- winners of the Nobel and Booker Prize, Sahitya Akademi award-winners, international, regional and national best-selling writers, they have begun to flock to Goa precisely because of the longstanding traditions of openness and tolerance that are now under threat. The unreasonableness of the HJS demand is underlined by its admission that the Husain painting that it wants removed isn't objectionable. Instead, it claims Husain "has always hurt the religious feelings and national sentiments of millions of Hindus and Indians -- his paintings of deities and Bharat Mata in the nude were thoroughly obscene". But this argument has already been comprehensively demolished by the Supreme Court of India decision of September 8 last year, when Chief Justice Balakrishnan noted that "there are many such pictures, paintings and sculptures, and some of them are in temples also". In Goa itself, we know that there are many striking examples of "sky-clad" deities, like the glorious Loliem Vetal (to name just one). The campaign by HJS actually has little to do with religion, instead it is all about the politics of intimidation. In this regard, it is instructive to read the text of the sharp rebuke delivered from the bench of the Delhi High Court earlier in 2008, to similar petitioners against the 92-year-old Husain. In plain language with great relevance to our current situation in Goa, Justice Sanjay Kaul wrote, "India's new Puritanism, practiced by a largely ignorant crowd in the name of India's spiritual purity, is threatening to throw the nation back into the pre-Renaissance era. The criminal justice system should not be used as an easy recourse to ventilate against a creative act." Justice Kaul added, very reasonably, "Our greatest problem today is fundamentalism, the triumph of the letter over the spirit. The test for judging a work of art should be that of an ordinary man of common sense and not that of a hyper-sensitive one -- looking at a piece of art from the painter's perspective becomes very important, especially in the context of the nude." Examine the astonishingly productive 70-year long career of Maqbool Fida Husain in the context of his peers in Indian contemporary art, and it immediately becomes clear that we are talking about a genuine desh-bhakt. He came to prominence after being discovered by our own, Saligao-born Francis Newton Souza, at whose invitation he joined the seminal Progressive Artist's Movement in 1947 (the Goan artists Vasudeo Gaitonde and Laxman Pai were also members of the PAM at various times). But unlike his avowed mentor Souza or friends, Gaitonde, Pai, Raza, Ram Kumar, Padamsee and many, many others, he never left India for the better developed art marketplaces of the West for any significant time. All through the very lean 1950's and 1960's, when there was only a very arid, impoverished market for Indian painters at home he stayed and painted in India, always on Indian themes like the Mahabharata, and lived in near-penury while his contemporaries achieved marginally better lives abroad. These were entire decades when the words 'modern art' were a kind of slur in India, except to a limited coterie of intellectuals and the occasional collector. Husain's career thus exactly mirrors the long doldrums and sudden, steep rise of contemporary Indian art, more so than any other painter. As India's increasingly moneyed urbanites developed (or aped) western-style bourgeois aspirations, they immediately fell upon Husain's paintings which almost overnight became status symbols, a Husain horse on your walls meant that you had arrived. And when our home-grown lakhpatis and crorepatis became dollar millionaires, a flashy Husain canvas became the essential accessory for conspicuous consumers, and his prices went even higher. Not at all coincidentally, this is when a fringe element in Indian society took notice and Husain started to come under attack. But the controversies did nothing to dampen ardour for his canvases -- Husain's huge diptych, 'Battle of Ganga and Jamuna: Mahabharata 12' sold for $1.6 million at auction last year. It is the highest priced contemporary Indian painting with only one exception, our man Francis Newton Souza's masterpiece 'Birth' which sold for $2.5 million, roughly at the same time. The brilliant, polymathic Souza definitely comes to mind as we face this crossroads in Goa's cultural development. Though he remained a very proud Goan all through his life, even into multiple (partly self-inflicted) exiles in Paris, London and New York, Souza also remained bitter about the provincial hostilities he faced in colonial Goa when he first showed off his brilliant canvases in the 1940s. Years later in London, just on the cusp of abrupt, meteoric fame, he would write, "better had I died. Would have saved me a lot of trouble. I would not have had to bear an artist's tormented soul, create art in a country that despises her artists and is ingnorant of her heritage." It should be noted that these words ring painfully true even today, in the state which has not acknowledged F. N. Souza in any way, where there is no monument or memorial to his name even in his native village, and the State Museum holds precisely one tiny, unrepresentative canvas that bears his signature. But there is no denying that times have indeed changed, and even Souza would get a chuckle out of the way that Goan art has become a buzzword that seems to connotes a kind of glamour to many. And it is undeniable fact that galleries, museum spaces and arts centres have mushroomed all over the state. Some of these are quite ambitious, with detailed plans to capitalize on Goa's rapidly developing status as a open-minded, quietly sophisticated, cultural centre and showcase for the arts. But these players should note that art has never been a safe, one-way ticket to glamour -- it has always involved a struggle to define safe boundaries, to ensure creative freedoms. They should be aware that all their ambitious plans for the arts in Goa will go nowhere if they do not step in right now to ensure that fringe elements cannot hold our culture to hostage. This is a test of resolve; the costs of capitulation will be extremely steep. [First published in Herald, under the title At Our Cultural Crossroads]